So why not animal Hamlet with a happy ending? (Also, there's a suck-up counselor in both, for another mark in the "squint or miss them" parallels. Though he doesn't die either in Disney's version.)

I guess I feel like "Prince turns into a frog" is enough to make it the Frog Prince because that's the hook there. (The princess didn't turn into a frog in the original, of course, but it's been done many times since.)

Where as with Hamlet the whole thing is about Hamlet being ordered by the ghost of his father to kill his uncle for usurprising the throne, and him working up to doing it. The Lion King is about a lion who mistakenly feels guilty about his father's death, grows up in the wilderness with a couple of guys and returns to the claim the throne after the evil Uncle's taken over.

It's not just the happy ending, it's that I can barely see anything in common in the two stories, particularly since "exiled prince returns to claim throne from usurper" seems like such a common trop in itself.

I had a cousin who loved Kimba, btw. When that movie came out my aunt was all about how it was Kimba.

Oh, very interesting about Kimba! I had not heard of that. Just when I think they can't do any more to prove themselves bigger intellectual property bullies, too.

As far as the Hamlet parallels, I think it isn't much looser an adaptation as some of the others, if that's what they really were thinking. Eg, I haven't seen the Princess and the Frog yet, but from what I've heard, it has very little in common with the original tale except the prince-turned-frog part. Not that it could be, the original being so short, but I think "wannabe restaurant owner in New Orleans" is a bit of a stretch from the original "princess with a golden ball," and I don't remember the princess turning into a frog first. (The end of The Frog Prince, Continued, yes, but that also sounds not quite like what Disney did.) So why not animal Hamlet with a happy ending? (Also, there's a suck-up counselor in both, for another mark in the "squint or miss them" parallels. Though he doesn't die either in Disney's version.)

Plus they did okay with The Lion King, which wasn't based on a well-known story as far as the public knew (at least, I don't remember it being marketed as "kid-friendly Hamlet").

I'm just commenting to say that I am such a *colossal idiot* that it never occurred to me that The Lion King could be seen as a Hamlet retelling.

In my defence, they did make some slight variations. Like only the bad guy dying. Although I think if you try really, really hard you could sing "I have of late - but wherefore I know not - lost all my mirth ..." to the tune of "Can you Feel the Love Tonight."

To clarify, I wonder if studio execs think a scene where the heroic leads essentially skip in together and go, "Mommy, we want to go on a quest..." and she tells the best friend to take care of her baby wouldn't be manly and heroic enough. Real heroes don't have mommies. Or hold hands. With anyone ever. And not acting within extremely rigid gender roles on screen would end civilization or something, so it's too scary to fund.

Maybe they thought the scene where Gilgamesh and Enkidu go see the queen while holding hands would be too controversial?

Now I'm trying to think of which other widely-known texts are not being adapted twice every five years. It's too bad they botched Troy so badly, because now Sean Bean probably won't ever get to star in The Odyssey (or, given their renaming pattern, perhaps it would be called Ithaca), and that might have been fun. And where are all the Oedipus Rex movies? Everyone's heard of Oedipus! There's a sphinx, a prophecy, a dude killing a stranger who happens to be his dad in a fit of rage, incest, and eyeball stabbing. Where's the modernized adaptation where Ed doesn't know about his sealed adoption and ends up killing some jerk CEO who cut him off in traffic and marrying his wife, only to have the company tank?

Anyway, I think at this point Disney has established "princesses" as practically a brand in its own right, and anything with a title like "A Whole Bunch of Princesses Engage in Practically Canonical Song-and-Dance Numbers" ought to fit their model just fine. Plus they did okay with The Lion King, which wasn't based on a well-known story as far as the public knew (at least, I don't remember it being marketed as "kid-friendly Hamlet").

I thought it was pretty original, not so much that it was time travel, but rather how it worked. Plus I liked the flying fortress idea.

And I felt the characters were all quite well-written, not with tremendous depth necessarily, but they all had distinct personalities and weren't too cliche. I guess without really hashing out the finer points we might just have to agree to disagree.

Wolfe has the occasional urge to attack cliche genre fiction head-on, with varying results. Free Live Free turned out pretty well I think, The Wizard Knight turned out really well, but An Evil Guest turned out pretty poorly. Oh well.

Fair enough, I haven't read Pandora by Holly Hollander or Castleview yet myself. Maybe selective reading has colored my perception of the character of Wolfe's standalones. Still, I thought Free Live Free was pretty weighty. Not as weighty as Peace, but it was rather complex in terms of the mystery and the

time-travel explanation.

Also the characters were well-realized. It was his version of a potboiler thriller I guess, just as An Evil Guest was his version of a pulp horror/spy story, but he handled it much better and, dare I say, much Wolfe-ier.

Finally started reading that Ron Moore interview. I had about the same reaction as Guy: wow, they could have used his advice in BSG! You know, the show where it took the writers three seasons to remember that since this fleet is out on its own, they should probably train more workers to process their fuel and other critical jobs, because working the same batch of people 24/7 until they drop is a bad plan which only people who aren't really trapped on their own would come up with. (Seriously. They never had a problem before that which drew attention to the immanent manpower shortage?) The show that introduced a prison ship which made a deal to do hard, dangerous labor in exchange for a measure of autonomy and then promptly forgot about them forever. The show that had a character taking over the black market only to promptly drop that forever too, even though being a crime boss would probably come in handy during election season.

If they're going to do fairy tale retellings, why can't they at least try some different ones for a change? (Two Snow Whites?) I haven't seen 12 Dancing Princesses lately, other than that YA novel The Phoenix Dance a while back (with a bipolar girl who wants to be a shoemaker instead of a prince, which was interesting). You'd think Disney, at least, would be all over a concept which included 12 princesses.

I disagree, I feel like his standalones like Free Live Free, There Are Doors, and Peace were much weightier than more recent ones like An Evil Guest or The Sorcerer's House or Pirate Freedom. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, except in the case of An Evil Guest, which I just didn't like very much at all. It just seemed kind of directionless and...missing something, I guess. There just wasn't a very good central conflict; the protagonist wasn't even privy to it, in a kind of sexist way.

I still need to get around to reading Home Fires. I remember liking The Sorcerer's House but not quite feeling up to reviewing it on FB due to not having anything particularly substantial to say about it. I'm still picking apart how I feel about An Evil Guest and I might need to reread before coming to any conclusions.

In general I think most of Wolfe's standalones have come under the "lighter fare" category since the 1980s, so I don't think it's a new thing. Or at least if there's a new thing, it's Wolfe shifting gears to concentrate primarily on standalones.